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by RoseFrederick
Summary: Ginny Weasley had been looking forward to her first year at Hogwarts for literally as long as she could remember. She could hardly wait, sure that Hogwarts was a shining promise of adventures to come.


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A/N: This was written for 2016's Darkest Night, a darkfic exchange, for reeby10 wanting something about Ginny having trouble coping with her experiences with Diary!Tom before, during, or after canon.

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Ever since the first time she can remember going to Platform 9¾ to see the oldest of her brothers off, Ginny has been waiting for the day it will finally be her own turn. Her turn to go off on the big red engine to the magical castle and make friends and have adventures. Having to be the last in such a very long line only makes her impatience and envy grow each time she has to see off another of her siblings while being left behind.

Still, the excitement builds as Ron gets his turn, and there's only one more year for her to wait. When he winds up best friends with Harry Potter, the Harry Potter, it's just confirmation to her that her own first year can only be great. She's a little less happy about that when Ron has his friend over to visit and she keeps embarrassing herself in front of him, but he's so cool about it that it just makes her admire him more. The hero from all the stories who banished He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, in her house! She can hardly believe it.

Then finally it's her turn. They're going to Diagon Alley with equipment lists for school like they do every year – but this year they're also shopping for things for _her._ It makes everything suddenly that much more magical, no matter how many times she's already been before. When she finds an enchanted diary that can talk back among her school books, it's just one more bit of excitement to savor. She's not sure if it's a gift from her parents or if it was left tucked inside another book on accident, and she doesn't ask because she doesn't want to have to give it back if it was an accident. It's so rare for her to get something that's not clothes her brothers haven't already had first. Ginny loves her parents, but always having second hand things is wearisome sometimes. A few of the books she ends up with for school are not exactly in the best shape, marked up and one even has a few pages missing.

That isn't enough to dampen her enthusiasm. Unfortunately, something else is. When she's complaining in the privacy of her new diary, it turns out the personality enchanted into it has an unfortunate streak of arrogance and says a few things that are just mean. After one particularly insulting exchange has her in tears, she almost leaves it behind at home when they head off to the station. She changes her mind at the last minute, though. Something tells her she's going to need it in the months to come. She's almost immediately sure she made the right choice, since he's contrite and apologetic the very next time she picks up the book. So Ginny writes the incident off as some peculiarity of the old and second-hand spell work on the object and all but forgets there was a problem when it doesn't happen again. There are old magic mirrors and portraits that get the same way sometimes, you just have to be firm with them.

He calls himself Tom, and bar those few first incidents, he's a good listener. As the school year starts up in earnest, Ginny is glad she has the diary. She needs somewhere to vent when her parents are too busy scolding her idiot brother for stealing the car and driving straight into the Whomping Willow to properly care she got sorted into Gryffindor. Being mentioned as an afterthought in a howler is mortifying and gets her more than a little teasing. She tries not to let it bother her, but the only other student she really knows is Luna Lovegood and even if they had been closer than neighbors who sometimes spent time together out of convenience, Luna's in Ravenclaw and a bit of an outcast besides.

Ginny tries to impress her teachers and make friends with her new housemates, but it's not as easy as it always sounded in her brother's letters. Ever since she lost her temper with Tom he's been so much more understanding, and it's just so much easier to write to him for hours than to go through the awkwardness of trying to feel out someone as a potential new friend. He's always curious about what she has to say and asks questions that show he's really listening. He's even perfectly willing to let her gush on at length about her crush on Harry Potter. He's so interested, in fact, she wonders a little bit about the original Tom Marvolo Riddle whose personality and quirks the diary's are probably based on. When she teases that he must also be into Harry, he gets all snide at her, but this time Ginny can't help but find it funny since he knows better than to insult her over it.

She knows a magical diary isn't a good substitute for real companions, but she's tired of restraining herself from rolling her eyes at each new iteration of someone wanting to compare her to what they know or have heard about her brothers. She's her own person, how hard can that be to understand? It's difficult being the youngest in a family like the Weasleys, even if she does stand out immediately for being the only girl – sometimes that just makes it worse. While Percy tries to help, as do Fred and George (for their own unique interpretation of helping), what Ginny wants is to stand on her own and be liked for herself. It took her years to find her place in the family and stand up to her brothers, giving as good as she got, and she'd thought that would make fitting in at Hogwarts easier. Instead, her year mates are pleasant enough but always seem to keep her at arm's-length.

She doesn't have to worry about any of that with Tom, though, and it's a relief. At least at first. Things gradually start to get weirder than just having trouble adjusting to life at Hogwarts, though. She starts losing time and finding herself in places she doesn't expect to be. She's never been a sleepwalker before, but Tom says maybe it is just a consequence of all the late nights up writing to him. He's just so good at understanding having trouble fitting in and needing to prove yourself. He always knows the right thing to say, and if he wasn't just a memory in a diary she'd be tempted to think she was falling for him. He's so clever and funny, and he's so eloquent when he talks about the power and majesty of being a magical person. And unlike Harry, Tom at least remembers she exists on a regular basis.

Of course, he is just an echo enchanted into a magical object, and Ginny isn't silly enough to forget that. At least not most of the time. But he just seems so real, more real than some of her classmates, who either ignore her or simply don't interest her. Of course, the more time she spends with Tom, the less and less any of her interactions with them seem worth the effort. They're just so silly and childish. Having him around is like having the perfect secret friend in her pocket who she can tell everything and anything to, and she knows he won't ever really hurt her. Even if he wanted to, he's just a cleverly enchanted book she could put away and forget.

She wants to keep believing that's true, but her memory lapses start to get worse and worse, and she starts to feel deeply tired for no obvious reason sometimes. As it just keeps happening, it finally starts to really scare her, but Tom keeps telling her not to worry about it. Which makes her actually start to consciously wonder for the first time if she can really trust him. But he's just a diary, so it's silly to think he might have anything to do with it. Which is maybe why she needs to stop taking his advice to hide what's happening with her, and so she resolves to tell someone else. Except every time she works up the courage to try and talk to her brother Percy or the mediwitch, she finds herself somewhere else, hours later.

That's not even all there is to it. At first, she thinks the thing where she keeps ending up covered in chicken feathers is some kind of stupid prank, probably some mischief of Fred and George's doing. Until it keeps happening, and until she connects the time she woke up covered in paint the same color as was used to write on the wall where Mrs. Norris was petrified. Tom just keeps telling her not to worry as more petrifications happen around the school and trying to distract her with other things, but the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes her memories always seem to be missing when the attacks happen. She can't exactly go around school asking everyone if they knew she wasn't at the scene of the crime. Desperate and guilty and afraid, when Tom starts to tell her she can't tell anyone because they'll know it's all her fault, she throws the diary away in that one haunted bathroom nobody uses.

She expects it to be a huge relief, especially when the lapses in memory stop happening to her immediately, confirming the root cause is something wrong with Tom. She doesn't know how she could have forgotten what her father always used to say about things that can think for themselves. Ginny knows she should tell someone, do something more than just get rid of the evidence, but she can't bring herself to admit to anyone what she's been doing almost the entire time she's been at Hogwarts. Maybe she hasn't made any friends yet, but she's been looking forward to coming here as long as she can remember. What if they expel her? No, she has to hope getting rid of the diary will be enough to break its connection to her. Even knowing Tom has been manipulating her all along, as he is with so many things, Tom is right, she can't afford to tell anyone.

Except getting rid of the diary isn't the relief she hopes it will be. She feels a constant pull to go and get it again that's incredibly hard to resist. She may not be losing time anymore, but she keeps finding excuses to wander through the corridor in front of that bathroom, barely holding back the temptation to go in each time. Even though she feels stronger and more alert than she has in weeks. Even knowing that Tom is somehow making her do things and forget them. Even when those things include petrifying other students. Even amid the fear someone will find the diary and know what she's done. None of that is enough to change how she feels – she still wants him back. When she sees the diary in Harry Potter's things, the combined fear that Tom has enough malice to show Harry everything she wrote about him and the desire to have the diary back in her hands overwhelms her. She tears the entire second year boy's dormitory apart in a frenzy to get the book back. Even as her hands shake with fear of what he might make her do as she flees, some part of Ginny is instantly soothed by having the diary back in her hands. It's the last thought she has for a while.

The next thing she knows, she's waking up weak and shaky in a strange place next to a grimy Harry. The diary is on the ground near them, destroyed, ink leaking everywhere. Some part of her brain takes in the Sorting Hat, Dumbledore's phoenix, and the fact that Harry has a sword, but she's too exhausted to really wonder at the explanation for all of that. She wants to cry for a lot of reasons, and she hates that seeing the book ruined is as much one of them as what she now remembers Tom making her write on the wall before sending her down here. Their exit from the chamber is a bit of a whirlwind to Ginny's exhausted mind, and she simply lets the others lead her out and her parents and teachers fuss over her safe return. She stays quiet on the outside, but inside, her feelings are far more in turmoil. It's over. It's all over. That one thought just keeps echoing through her head, and she couldn't even say for sure if she feels relief or despair over it.

The Weasleys have been a staunch bastion of light wizards for almost as long as their history is remembered as a family. Weasleys are never tempted by the dark, everyone knows this. Yet as much as everyone from Harry, to Dumbledore, to her parents attempts to tell her that none of this was her fault, though keeping the diary and not telling anyone was a bad idea, she knows better. Maybe they just have to say those things to reassure themselves, maybe they just don't understand. She'd wanted a friend badly enough to ignore all the signs, and then as time had worn on, she'd craved Tom's approval and attention even as she knew something terrible was happening to her. Maybe she really _is_ fundamentally different from the rest of her family.

Even at the very end when she'd known for certain he was blatantly using her, known he'd intended to steal her life away, she'd still been so drawn to him. To Tom, who was really the darkest wizard since Grindelwald. If it had been up to her to give her life or destroy the diary, destroy Tom who felt like a part of her … she knows the outcome down in the Chamber of Secrets would have been very different. It doesn't matter what they all say, there has to be something fundamentally wrong with her for her to have felt such a pull to such evil. How can she ever trust her own judgment again? If He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named does ever return from wherever Harry has banished him to, how can she know she won't feel the same pull to the older version of the same dark wizard? The idea terrifies her and she can't get it out of her head. It does not help that her family keeps asking her if she wants to talk about what happened, and the only one who she really would have felt comfortable telling any of it is Tom.


End file.
